The Movie Database
Courtesy TMDB
By Pete Foster
July 28, 2023
In the series, mankind has not conquered interstellar space travel like, say, star trek, but it has managed to conquer our solar system. Earth has branched out to the outlying planets establishing permanent colonies, many of them mining towns reminiscent of the old West. All this is due to a fellow named Epstein who, by accident, invents a space drive so powerful that he finds himself unable to rise from his couch due to the incapacitating g forces placed on his body, loses consciousness and he and his spacecraft shoot off into the unknown void. Luckily he left behind notes and diagrams so others could duplicate that which caused his demise.
So, due to the Epstein engine, the human race can now reach far into the solar system in a matter of months, which used to take years and exploit in the process any riches it may discover. Mars becomes a permanent colony which desires its own autonomy from Mother Earth which supplies them, in an act of paternal absolutism, with fresh water and air. Mars, after forming its own army and navy, wishes nothing more than to escape the crushing taxation from Mother Earth.
If this all sounds familiar, it closely parallels the War of Independence fought between the Americans and the British. Now flying across the solar system presents its own sets of problems. Firstly the equipment used to power their spacecraft far exceeds the ability of the human body to withstand it. Human bodies are incredibly frail even when it comes to withstanding sub-light speed, especially when you consider moving something that fast. Modern fighter jets actually have a fail-safe system for pilots because the airframes are rated for far more gs than the human body can tolerate, and trying to fly unconsciously is not great for your future well-being.
If you move something that fast, gradually get it up to speed, well when you get to your destination, you now have to slow it down, so you turn the Epstein drive in the opposite direction of your travel, and use it to slow your spacecraft down, so you spend your travel time speeding up or slowing down, and how soon you can arrive at your destination is determined by how many gs you can comfortably survive.
People born off-Earth, yes, people have sex in space*, can never return to the Earth as its gravity will crush their bodies. Weaponry for spacecraft need not be proton torpedoes or phaser beams; all you need is lots of standard Gatling gun rounds that pierce your spacecraft and vent it into hard vacuum. Even a convenient rock placed in the proper trajectory and speed works just as well as a nuclear bomb.
So spacecraft like, the Enterprise that can achieve up to and including 10 times the speed of light and achieve that incredible speed in the blink of a cosmic eye, one can only wonder what would happen to the frail human bodies inside that spacecraft. Something gene Roddenberry never considered, I am sure.
My memory was jarred into recalling all this by the unfortunate souls aboard the ill-fated Titan submersible. They perished in an environment even more dangerous than outer space, and they never even left the planet.
Editors Note: Peter goes out of his way to conjure the image of space-sex; however, Earth-sex could also lead to a space-birth and vice versa. Vice versa - in both that space-sex could lead to Earth-birth AND an Earth-birth could eventually lead to space-sex, BUT space-birth shouldn’t lead to Earth-sex, due to gravity, but if it did, it would be followed by an Earth-funeral. Or a space-funeral.
